


More Than...

by BrusselsSprout



Series: Variations (S6 speculation stories) [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, CryoFitz, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fitzsimmons baby, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Verbal Abuse, post-s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 19:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15735669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrusselsSprout/pseuds/BrusselsSprout
Summary: When Fitz is woken up and returned from space post-S5 events, he finds a new reality he has difficulties to come to terms with. He goes to a place where he can find himself first.





	More Than...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [besidemethewholedamntime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/besidemethewholedamntime/gifts).



> This fic has been created for the Fitz Birthday Exchange for @besidemethewholedamntime
> 
> The prompt was: Fitz + ‘one day I pray I’ll be more than my father’s son’

It was surreal; the eyes that stared back at him with detached curiosity. They were exactly like his own eyes, his father’s eyes, the Doctor’s eyes. Endless possibilities of love and destruction, happiness and pain, anger and kindness, good and evil. All of it was inside him.

 

Fitz sat in the back room of an unfamiliar cottage unable to shake the feeling that he did not belong there. Jemma was sleeping peacefully in their bedroom, her world apparently mended by his return, but Fitz was kept awake, his mind swirling with a barrage of unsettling thoughts.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There were rites of passage: a romantic proposal with a carefully selected ring, merciless teasing at his stag party, saying his wedding vows with quivering voice, sipping colourful drinks on their honeymoon under palm trees swaying in a warm breeze, carrying his bride through the threshold of their home.  He should have gone through all the milestones like dancing around the living room with a positive pregnancy test, watching with amazement the first blurry ultrasound picture, driving around at night for tropical mango swirl ice-cream, holding Jemma’s hand in the delivery room tearfully clutching a camera in his hand.

 

Instead their timeline had been fractured - the linear line broken into a maze of vectors pointing into different directions, depicting an inter-dimensional equation that was outside the realm of laws of maths and physics, incomprehensible to his mind. His life was in fragments - pieces of unlived, but real moments and lived, but unreal moments thrown around, impossible to fit together in a way that made sense.

 

In the center of all this chaos was the baby - impossible, yet real - created by him (or by some permutation of him) on a sleepless night at the edge of the end of the world when he was sleeping in an icy coffin a million miles away.

 

His eyes fell on the mobile above the crib, pulled the string, and the moon, the stars and the spaceship started to move around to the tune of a lullaby. The baby watched it mesmerised, little hands flailing, trying to grab the moving pieces. Fitz closed his eyes.

 

_Glasgow, 19th August 1993_

 

_It was already dark when the key turned in the door. Leo jumped up and ran to the hallway with excitement. He had been waiting for his father to come home the whole day, so they could finally eat his birthday cake. His mum baked his favourite; a dark, fudgy chocolate sponge cake and decorated it with monkeys - and he was getting impatient. He scrunched his nose as the sour scent of alcohol hit it when the door opened. Still, the boy saw with excitement the giant box his father was carrying; it had to be his birthday present._

 

_“Dad!” he jumped on him with a wide smile._

 

_“Alistair, we’ve been waiting for hours.” his mum’s voice was sharp with disapproval._

 

_“The boy needs to learn patience and discipline. You are spoiling him rotten - he’ll be a good-for-nothing weakling,” he grumbled, but sat down at the table._

 

_After dinner they sang happy birthday and Leo blew out the birthday candles wishing that his father would smile at him with pride. He opened his presents trying to control his impatience  - he got a sketchbook and a microscope.The huge box that his father was carrying turned out to be a Lego Technic Multi Model boxset that he long coveted. He tore the box open eagerly. At first he looked at the pieces, arranging them by size, colour and type. Then in his mind the pieces began to fit together. Never looking at the instruction leaflet, he built swiftly and without hesitation - he knew exactly what those pieces were meant to be._

 

_An hour later, he took the ready spaceship to his father, who was watching football on the TV, holding a glass of beer._

 

_“Look what I made, Dad.” he held up his model with a proud smile._

 

_His father took a cursory look at it, his eyes darkening with disappointment. “That’s not what you were supposed to build. You’re so dimwitted, you can’t even follow a simple instruction, boy.” He shook his head in resignation and turned his attention back to the game._

 

_The model fell on the floor. Leo ran up to his room, hiding the tears that were piercing his eyes. Crying would only make his father angrier. He sat on his bed, hugging his pillow, burying his head in it, wishing he was his father’s son, someone who could make him happy._

_There was a soft knock on the door and his mother entered. She carried the spaceship in her hands.  "_ _It’s beautiful, Leo.” she placed the model next to him._

 

_“No, father says that’s not what it was supposed to be.” he turned his face away. He could not bear to look at the evidence of his utter failure to please him. Yet again._

 

_His mother sat next to him and put an arm around his shoulder. “It’s much more special, honey. You imagined it. It’s not a copy of someone else’s dream - it’s born out of your wonderful mind. You have such a talent to make sense of things, fit parts together in a way nobody has ever done before you. In your hands, the parts become more than what they were meant to be. You’ll build something like this for real one day.”_

 

_“You think so, mum?” he asked, his voice a little bit more hopeful._

 

_“I know so, my dear boy.” she smiled at him and in that moment he believed nothing was impossible._

 

_He held up the spaceship and pushed a button. The toy construction flew towards the ceiling and circled around the lamp, but in his mind he already saw a mighty craft roaming free in space heading for the stars. “I’ll call it Zephyr.”_

 

_“That’s a good name, Leo. I hope you’ll take me for a spin in it one day. Happy birthday, my beautiful son.”  she whispered softly into his hair. Leo sighed deeply, feeling calm and safe._

 

Fitz opened his eyes shaking off the memory and returned his gaze to the baby. He should have felt an overwhelming love and affection for that little life - part him, part  Jemma - but in truth, he felt distance. Here they were, a pair of space-time anomalies, refugees of the fourth dimension.

For the longest time he thought that leaving was the ultimate betrayal, but now he wondered whether the greatest gift his father ever gave him was walking out of his life at the age of 10, before it was too late. Maybe some pieces were never meant fit together. 

Fitz held out his hand and the baby’s tiny fingers curled around his index-finger. He stared at it. There was a lump in his throat - that gesture of trust overwhelmed him. How could he do right by the boy if he didn’t even know who he was anymore?

 

He slipped out of the cottage, leaving a note for Jemma that he had to take care of something.

 

0-0-0-0

 

The house was smaller than he remembered - with red bricks and a white door, the small front yard, as always bloomed with colourful flowers.  Fitz took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

 

The door opened almost immediately and there she was: his mother looked older and a bit heavier than the last time he saw her - maybe a year or two ago? It was difficult to keep the timeline straight in his head with all that happened. But her eyes were the same; they glimmered with warmth and love as she fiercely embraced him. “My boy,” she said with emotion.

 

“Mum.” he managed to mutter with a lump in his throat. She ushered him into the house. He sat down at the kitchen table, while she brewed tea and put shortbread in front of him. It tasted like childhood - like the age of innocence when everything was possible. She sat down next to him with her own cup. “It’s good to see you, Leo.” she smiled.

 

“I’m sorry, I’ve disappeared, mum. Things got messed up.” he said, unsure how to explain things about dark magic, killer robots, alternate reality mind prison, time travel or the end of the world, not to mention the wedding or the child. “I...I did some terrible things,” he whispered. It felt good to finally say it aloud, to admit to his mistakes. A tear rolled down his cheek and it felt cleansing. She silently put her hand on his without any judgement and sat with him as he cried.

 

He went up to his old room - his mother kept it as he left it. Fitz started to feel like he remembered who he was, as he ran his fingers through the spines of his old books arranged by subject, things that fascinated him as a boy: space, airplanes, monkeys. He found his old sketchbook and flipped through the pages, remembering his dreams of building all kinds of marvelous things from robot ants, to superhero suits and planes. He thought of his designs and felt that the boy would have mostly approved of the things he built as an adult.

 

His old stuffed monkey, Chimp was sitting on his bed, looking at him through his shiny button-eyes. Fitz intensely remembered the night his father tore the monkey in half, yelling that he was too old for such childish toys. He remembered tears of pain and shame running down his face as he cowered watching in horror that Alistair threw Chimp into the bin. He left a few days later, banging the door loudly behind him. Fitz found Chimp in his bed that night, lovingly repaired and washed. He wasn’t the only one in the family who had a talent for fitting broken pieces together.

 

He grabbed the monkey and went back to the kitchen to his mother. “I’d like to show you something, mum. Do you remember the spaceship I wanted to build?” He took her to the field where he left the Zephyr cloaked.

 

She watched with amazement as the magnificent plane appeared. “You built it, didn’t you? I remember. You wanted to call it Zephyr.”

 

He smiled - his mother always listened, really listened, remembering all the details of his childish aspirations. “Come, I also promised to take you for a spin.”

 

They ascended first above the dark clouds and then beyond, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. They floated in space and looked at the blue planet, shining like a jewel. The look of awe on his mother's face reminded Fitz that perspective was important. It felt like a fair deal that it was his life that got cracked apart this time, instead of humanity's home.

 

“It’s amazing, Leo.” his mother said. “It was your dream and now here we are.”

 

He bit his lips. He couldn’t tell her the whole truth, but he really wanted to tell at least a version of it. “I had a different dream too, mum. More like a nightmare… of a life where you were gone and I grew up with father. I think, I’m just like him - full of shadow and evil.” His voice was hoarse.

 

“Is that why you came?” she asked quietly.

 

“I think anything that’s good in me comes from you. And now I need to know that I can be more than him.”

 

“Of course you are more. You have always had the talent to fit seemingly unworkable pieces together and create something nobody saw in them. What is this about?” She looked at him questioningly.

 

“Would you help me remember, mum?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

 

His mother smiled and told him stories of a shy boy with a big heart and a mind full of amazing dreams. The boy who wanted to build things to help people; pouring his energy into designs to help poor, old Mrs McQuiston whose eyesight was getting bad, Mr Brown who had a bad back and could not lift things anymore, who made dancing puppets for little Cathy three doors down to make her laugh when she had to stay indoors for months as she was recovering from cancer. As he listened to his mother’s stories, Fitz started to feel more rooted in reality and the present. He felt like he had a core again, a center of gravity where his fragmented lives could perhaps come together.

 

When his mother finished her stories, she asked “Care to tell me where we are going?”

 

“Home.” Fitz replied with sudden clarity as he set the flight coordinates back to Jemma’s cottage. “I want you to meet someone.”

 

They entered the door and Fitz led his mum to the nursery. “Mum, this is your grandson.”

 

She stepped closer to the crib and looked at the baby. She ran her fingers through his fine hair and silky skin, cooing softly at him. “He’s beautiful. And you’ll be a great dad.”

 

“Do you think so?” Fitz still felt unsure.

 

“I know it.” she said firmly.

 

Her words were like a warm blanket, making him feel calmer, safer. Maybe he was his father’s son, but he was also his mother’s child. The boy who could fit pieces together so they became more than a sum of their parts. Maybe the fragments of his life could also add up to something more. More than his father’s son.

 

Fitz put the stuffed monkey in the crib, carefully scooped up the baby and held him close, breathing in his sweet scent. He looked at his mum who gave him an encouraging smile. As the baby curled up against his chest, he realized that he had been looking at it all wrong. All the broken pieces of him, against all odds and logic came together in a mysterious way to create a new life of endless possibilities, a miracle untainted by the darkness. His mother was right, he was already much more than his father’s son, he was his son’s father.

  
  



End file.
